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Faint Damns. Committee Counsel Edward Morgan pointed out that Lattimore had helped raise money for Finland during the Soviet-Finnish war and had also supported the Marshall Plan, but Witness Budenz seemed not to be impressed. Exemptions from the party line were granted to people "in delicate positions," he said. He also had his own explanation of the Worker's criticism of Lattimore's recent book, Situation in Asia: "It is a policy to praise them with faint damns. We have this method used on a number of distinguished men, who if praised too closely would simply be destroyed."
Budenz admitted that he had not mentioned Lattimore to the FBI until "a couple of days" after committee members had been shown a summary of the FBI's file. Why hadn't he mentioned Lattimore before? He hadn't had time to get around to it, explained Budenz, though he conceded that he had been supplying names to the FBI for five years. He had even taken Lattimore's name out of a recent piece for Collier's because "all concealed Communists can sue anyone for libel, not for the purpose of winning, but to bleed white anyone who accuses them."
Basis in Fact. Lattimore, who had been scribbling notes furiously as Budenz testified, promptly struck back. His lawyers sent to the stand Brigadier General Elliott R. Thorpe, a retired officer who was General Douglas MacArthur's wartime counter-intelligence chief. He had investigated Lattimore, said Thorpe, in the 19303, in 1944, in 1947. "Never in my experience as an intelligence officer have I heard a man so frequently referred to as a 'Communist' with so little basis in fact," testified Thorpe.
Lattimore himself, in a press conference next day, insisted that in his eleven books and hundreds of articles there was not "a single instance" where he had referred to the Chinese Communists as "agrarian reformers," the political euphemism used in the Communist Party line. Said Lattimore: "But I suppose that to [Budenz] every anti-Communist statement that I made was either for the purpose of covering my true affiliation or was by what he calls special dispensation."
Problem of Proof. As the hearing recessed, the evidence against Lattimore was entirely based on hearsay, as Budenz himself admitted. But it had come from a man whose testimony could not lightly be dismissed. He had been one of the witnesses who named Alger Hiss as a Communist, had exposed Gerhart Eisler as the Soviets' top espionage agent in the U.S., had been used by the Government as its star witness against the eleven Communist leaders. Born in Indianapolis 58 years ago, Budenz grew up in the Roman Catholic faith, but soon after his graduation from law school, he married a divorcee and was excommunicated. He plunged into socialist and labor activity, became an A.F.L. organizer (he was tried and acquitted 21 times in eight years in labor disputes). In 1935, he joined the Communist Party, left it ten years later, returned to the Catholic Church, is now teaching economics at Fordham University.